Never allow a person to tell you "no" who doesn't have the power to say "yes."

- Eleanor Roosevelt

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention.... A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

- Rachel Naomi Remen

He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.

- Laozi (Lao Tzu, Lao Tse, Lao Tsu)

Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all.

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.

- Carter G. Woodson

You've always had the power right there in your shoes, you just had to learn it for yourself. (The Wizard of Oz)

- Frank L. Baum

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so foaming, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!

- Soren Kierkegaard

From antiquity, people have recognized the connection between naming and power.

- Casey Miller and Kate Swift

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.

- Robin Morgan

Love in organizations, then, is the most potent source of power we have available.

- Margaret J. Wheatley

America was not built by conformists, but by mutineers.

- Jim Hightower

The "trickle-down" theory: the principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.

- William Blum

A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.

- Aldous Huxley

The best safeguard against fascism is to establish social justice to the maximum extent possible.

- Arnold Toynbee

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

- Elie Wiesel

I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow.

- Abraham Lincoln



Power is the ability to define reality and to have other people respond to your definition as if it were their own.

- Dr. Wade Noble



The people starve because those above them eat too much tax-grain. That is the only reason why they starve.

- Laozi (Lao Tzu, Lao Tse, Lao Tsu)



I believe in the necessity for struggle by people at the bottom of any society.

- Frances Fox Piven



I believe in only one thing: liberty, but I do not believe in liberty enough to want to force it upon anyone.

- H. L. Mencken



Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.

- Oprah Winfrey



We thought, because we had power, we had wisdom.

- Stephen Vincent Benet



You can't make your kids do anything. All you can do is make them wish they had. And then, they will make you wish you hadn't made them wish they had.

- Marshall Rosenberg



Nothing is so hard for those who abound in riches as to conceive how others can be in want.

- Jonathan Swift



Where there is power, there is resistance.

- Foucault



No one is in control of your happiness but you; therefore, you have the power to change anything about yourself or your life that you want to change.

- Barbara de Angelis



All outward forms of religion are almost useless, and are the causes of endless strife. . . . Believe there is a great power silently working all things for good, behave yourself and never mind the rest.

- Beatrix Potter



Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

- Madame de Stael



Freedom is the emancipation from the arbitrary rule of other men.

- Mortimer Adler



We tend to look through language and not realize how much power language has.

- Deborah Tannen



Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

- Theodor Adorno



I think that the question of how power can be exerted from the lower reaches has never been more important. It will ultimately determine whether another world is indeed possible

- Frances Fox Piven



We all have our own life to pursue, our own kind of dream to be weaving. And we all have some power to make wishes come true, as long as we keep believing.

- Louisa May Alcott



We cannot avoid using power, cannot escape the compulsion to afflict the world, so let us, cautious in diction and mighty in contradiction, love powerfully.

- Martin Buber



Power doesn't have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.

- Ralph Ellison



The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.

- Franklin D. Roosevelt



I propose that there is another kind of power based not on resources, things, or attributes, but rooted in the social and cooperative relations in which people are enmeshed by virtue of group life.

- Frances Fox Piven



A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.

- Margaret Atwood



It is in the Earth's green covering of grass;
In the blue serenity of the Sky;
In the reckless exuberance of Spring;
In the severe abstinence of gray Winter;

- Rabindranath Tagore



Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.



Truth resides in every human heart, and one has to search for it there, and to be guided by truth as one sees it. But no one has a right to coerce others to act according to his own view of truth.

- Mohandas K. Gandhi



Many groups that have the power to make life decisions for others don't ever have to live out the consequences.

- Frances Fox Piven



Transformation is only valid if it is carried out with the people, not for them. Liberation is like a childbirth, and a painful one. The person who emerges is a new person: no longer either oppressor or oppressed, but a person in the process of achieving freedom. It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors.

- Paulo Freire



Nonviolence, exactly like violence, is a means of persuasion, a technique for political activism, a recipe for prevailing.

- Mark Kurlansky



At every turn when there has been an imbalance of power, the truth questioned, or our beliefs and values distorted, the change required to restore our nation has always come from the bottom up from our people.

- Howard Dean